curiouser
by Chassant
Summary: In which Axel falls in love with the boy with the Cheshire Cat grin. AU, AkuRoku. A modern retelling of Alice, Kingdom Hearts style.


**A/N: **I'm sure something like this has been done before, but probably not in this way - and the story is all about the telling, right? This is a little, er, unconventional, but it's an idea that's been nagging at me for a long time...and one day, I just decided to write it. So here we are :)

It's a little shorter than my chapters usually are, but rest assured, I'll be back up to par soon enough. I just had to get this part out of the way.

I hope you guys like it, and review? Pwease? Pretty pwease?

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><p>"I'm late."<p>

Axel massaged his temple lightly with one hand. This, he thought, was exactly why it was best not to sleep with women - sure, they were pretty and all, with their curves and breasts and feminine wiles - but they were ultimately much more trouble than they were worth. Boys were just as beautiful in their own way. And best of all, they didn't get fucking _pregnant._

The sound of traffic filled in his silence.

He forced himself to stop looking over her shoulder at all of the people passing on the sidewalk opposite the small eatery where they'd met up, made himself look her in her bright blue eyes which were partially obscured by a curtain of white-blonde hair. He was relieved to find that she was not looking at him, either, but at the table.

He did not know her. She was just an encounter (as they all were - relationships seemed to slide off of him like a kid off of a Slip N' Slide), a one night stand executed in the back of his old Buick under the influence of tequila and too many racy songs. He'd left her his number on a greasy napkin and had expected never to hear from her again.

When she had called him, he had expected something like this. It wasn't the first time – and he hoped the results remained consistent because, hell, he couldn't even keep a fish alive. Or a plant. He was certain, really, that if it weren't for his body's involuntary will to survive, he would have been eating dust and worms a _long_time ago.

"Well, uh..."

"Namine." She reminded him kindly. "My name is Namine."

"Right. I'm Axel, in case you didn't get it memorized."

"I did."

Axel fidgeted, cleared his throat uncomfortable. "Well, Namine…don't you, uh, think you should take some kind of test?"

"I hate studying." She joked weakly. She finally looked up from the spot she had been observing on the table, her expression serious. "I…didn't want to do it alone."

Her blue eyes were nearly pleading. _Fuck._He'd always had a thing for blue eyes, and when she looked at him like that, his heart softened.

"…I'll go with you."

"Wonderful. You're wonderful." She grasped both his hands in hers and kissed one, then the other. "But first we have to go and see the Queen."

"Your Queen? We live in America, you know. Last time I checked, this was Philadelphia."

"Yes, you're right." She said. "But we still have to go see her."

_Jesus fucking Christ, this girl is crazy, _he realized suddenly. _But maybe the guy with the teardrop tattoos isn__'__t in a good place to be calling others crazy._

He wanted to write her off, tell her to go fuck herself; he wasn't going to find her damn 'queen'. Only she had this look in her eyes that made it damn near impossible to refuse her.

"Fine." He sighed. "Let's go. Do we need to go get the car? Because I walked here. My apartment's only a block away."

"No, we can walk. It's not far. Well, it's not far in the usual sense." She sprung to her feet. He stood up slowly.

_What in the hell have I gotten myself into?_

* * *

><p>Namine had a way of walking that was almost like a prance, quick and light of step, and she danced ahead of him as if she positively could not wait to get wherever it was they were going. Axel was completely clueless as to where that might be.<p>

He just wanted to get this over with.

He started to feel slightly uneasy when she turned their trajectory northwards, towards Strawberry Mansion, Ivy Hill, and a number of other unsavory neighborhoods. It was nowhere that he hadn't been before, but that only made it a modicum better.

"Are you sure it's safe for you to be going this way?"

She looked back at him over her shoulder and smiled a very disarming smile. "Sure it is. I'm with you, right?"

"Listen, Namine, I'm not really the best – I mean I can fight and all, but I don't know if-

"Stop being so worried. I've been here a _thousand_times before. No, more. Besides, we're almost there."

"I'll…take your word for it."  
><em><br>_They passed sad looking apartments with decaying paint and several junked cars parked haphazardly along the side of the road, continuing their journey north. Namine seemed unfazed and light as ever.

"Here." She said, after they had traversed down Diamond Street for some time.

They had stopped in the middle of the road. Axel looked to his left, then his right, trying to discern which one of these buildings they would be subjecting themselves to; however, the girl made no move in either direction.

In fact, when he looked back to her, she was kneeling, focused on removing the manhole cover.

"Uh, Namine? Earth to Namine? Where are we going?"

"Down here, silly." She said, and promptly proceeded to climb down.

_You have got to be fucking kidding me. No. Absolutely not. I__'__ve done a lot of crazy shit in my life, but this is totally, unequivocally, one hundred percent ridic -_

She looked at him from the depths of the hole. All he could see from the darkness of it was her hair in the setting sun, white and brilliant, and the gleam of her blue eyes beckoning him to follow her like a child would beckon another to play.

Despite himself and the unwilling protests of his survival instincts (the ones that had kept him on two feet for twenty four years), he swung one leg over, found a rung, and climbed down.

* * *

><p>It was not what Axel had expected.<p>

It was not a sewer, it was not wet, and it did not smell like shit. It was dark, of course, and very quiet – but a dim, red light spilled from somewhere up ahead and if he listened closely, he could hear something that sounded vaguely like chatter.

"Where are we?"

"The Underland." She said, as if it were the most obvious answer. "Come on."

"Don't you mean the under_ground?_"

"No. That's not what I mean at all. Don't you know? Maybe you don't. Well, it's no matter. This is the Underland." She giggled. "You'll find out soon enough. Come on now, we're wasting time – we must see the Queen."

He followed her down the dark path, towards the light source. The Underland – what a strange term. And where had he heard it before?

The light, it turned out, was coming from a crack in the wall, just large enough to fit a small human body. Namine slipped through it with remarkable ease. Axel stretched his limbs and thanked Nature for giving him a slender, tall frame.

He edged through the crack. On the other side was a tile room, checkered in white and black. People milled about, although most of them seemed not to notice, or not to care. Most were dressed in some very odd, very colorful clothing, though some of them wore nothing but black.

He turned to ask Namine what was next, but she was gone.

_Fuck._

He didn't think she'd left him there on purpose, but he couldn't believe she hadn't waited for him. Didn't she know how strange this was to him? How distracting? He scanned the crowd, searching for a glimpse of her hair or the white sundress she'd been wearing, but came up empty. Nothing. She was gone.

A table sat in the center of the room. His curiosity (which had, it seemed, been in a constant battle with his survival instincts) drove him towards it. On the table sat a bottle of unidentified liquid - the label read only "Drink Me."

It was an invitation. He lifted the bottle.

/You wouldn't do that if you had any sense at all./ His instincts warned him.

"But I don't." He said aloud. Nobody seemed to find this odd. And because he was wild, and insatiable, he drank.

He felt small and dizzy, exhilirated and frightened by the strange world he'd been cast into. He looked around, drinking in all of it.

Suddenly he felt hot breath at his ear.

"Lose something?" A voice crooned, made of soft silk and deception, something like a spider's web.

He turned around and came face to face with the most stunning pair of blue eyes he'd ever seen. There was a boy attached to the eyes, but Axel did not notice him at first. All he could see were those _eyes_, god, they were the bluest things he had ever seen, bluer than Namine's - the kind of eyes that swept him up, devoured him, sent tidal waves crashing against the walls of his insides.

When he did notice the boy, his first thought was that he could be Namine's twin; only his hair was pure gold, his face was perfectly angular, and his grin was mischievous.

Axel's second thought was that he was beautiful. His third was that the boy would drive him mad.

"Yes - I - I - " he stammered. The boy's grin grew wider, and then he too was gone.

"No." Axel keened. He stumbled through the crowd, looking for any glimpse of the golden boy, but he was nowhere to be found. He felt suddenly and irrationally like he might cry.

What the hell was with this place?

He staggered on, though both Namine and the boy had seemingly vanished in midair. The checkered tile was cold underneath his bare feet; he looked down and wondered at what point exactly he had lost his shoes, because he was almost certain he had come in with them and did not remember removing them. The red light that saturated the entire room was both comforting and irritating.

He stopped, dead in his tracks, when he stumbled into the kid smoking the hookah.


End file.
